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Intervention and Collective Self-Determination

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 September 2012

Jeff McMahan
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Abstract

Intervention often violates both respect for state sovereignty and the right to self-determination. McMahan focuses on the latter ethical dimension rather than the former political and legal one, although his claims have important implications for issues of state sovereignty. He challenges the common assumption that respect for self-determination requires an almost exceptionless doctrine of nonintervention by first defining the notions of “intervention” and “self-determination,” and then analyzing Walzer's doctrine of nonintervention. The recognition that there are different ideals of self-determination results in a less rigid and more permissive doctrine of nonintervention.

Type
Articles
Information
Ethics & International Affairs , Volume 10 , March 1996 , pp. 1 - 24
Copyright
Copyright © Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs 1996

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References

1 For a more precise articulation of the requirements of necessity and proportionality, see McMahan, Jeff and McKim, Robert, “The Just War and the Gulf War,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 23 (December 1993), 506–18, 523–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 Hehir, J. Bryan, “Intervention: From Theories to Cases,” Ethics & International Affairs 9 (1995), 4CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 McMahan, Jeff, “The Ethics of International Intervention,” in Kipnis, Kenneth and Meyers, Diana T., eds., Political Realism and International Morality: Ethics in the Nuclear Age (Boulder: Westview Press, 1988), 75–101Google Scholar.

4 I employ the adjective “collective” to distinguish the relevant notion from individual self-determination or autonomy. I avoid the more common term “national self-determination,” which might be thought to imply that the ideal of collective self-determination properly applies only to nationsGoogle Scholar.

5 See, for example, French, Stanley and Gutman, Andres, “The Principle of National Self-Determination,” in Held, Virginia, Morgenbesser, Sidney, and Nagel, Thomas, eds., Philosophy, Morality, and International Affairs (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), 138–53Google Scholar.

6 See Buchanan, Allen, Secession: The Morality of Political Divorce from Fort Sumter to Lithuania and Quebec (Boulder: Westview Press, 1991)Google Scholar, 50. Daniel Philpott defines self-determination as “a legal arrangement which gives [a group] independent statehood or greater autonomy within a federal state.” See his , “In Defense of Self-Determination,” Ethics 105 (January 1995), 353Google Scholar.

7 Michael Walzer writes that “to give up the state is to give up any effective self-determination.” What Walzer seems to mean here, however, is not that a community cannot be self-determining without a state of its own, but that other means of achieving self-determination require as a background condition that there be sovereign states. Walzer, , Spheres of Justice (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983), 44Google Scholar.

8 Greene, Graham, The Comedians (London: Penguin, 1976), 232Google Scholar. It is worth noting, however, that this sort of view is a relatively recent phenomenon. As Christopher Morris notes, “until this century the norm for most peoples, European included, was rule by foreigners Just and efficient rule by foreigners seemed preferable to most people to unjust or inefficient rule by one's own.” See Morris, , An Essay on the Modern State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,CrossRefGoogle Scholar forthcoming, 1997), ch. 8.

9 These and similar claims are elaborated in my paper “The Limits of National Partiality,” in McKim, Robert and McMahan, Jeff, eds., The Morality of Nationalism (New York: Oxford University Press,Google Scholar forthcoming), though I do not pretend that they are original. Compare, for example, Margalit, Avishai and Raz, Joseph, “National Self-Determination,” Journal of Philosophy 87 (September 1990), 443–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Tamir, Yael, Liberal Nationalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993)Google Scholar; Taylor, Charles, Philosophy and the Human Sciences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Walzer, Spheres of Justice.

10 Walzer, , Spheres of Justice, 29Google Scholar.

11 Ibid., 62Google Scholar.

12 Walzer, Michael, Just and Unjust Wars (New York: Basic Books, 1977), 61, 72Google Scholar. See also his “The Moral Standing of States,” in Beitz, Charles R., et al. , eds., International Ethics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985)Google Scholar, 217–37.

13 Walzer, , Just and Unjust Wars, 90Google Scholar, and “The Moral Standing of States,” 225–26.

14 Walzer, , Just and Unjust Wars, 93Google Scholar.

15 Walzer, , “The Moral Standing of States,” 101Google Scholar.

16 Walzer, , Just and Unjust Wars, 93–94Google Scholar.

17 Buchanan, Secession, esp. ch. 3. For a recent defense of a position between those of Walzer and Buchanan, see Philpott, “In Defense of Self-Determination”Google Scholar.

18 McMahan, , “The Ethics of International Intervention,” 96Google Scholar.

19 Walzer, , “The Moral Standing of States,” 225Google Scholar.

20 Walzer, , Just and Unjust Wars, 96Google Scholar.

21 Again, for a detailed analysis of the proportionality requirement, see McMahan and McKim, “The Just War and the Gulf War,” sect. 3Google Scholar.

22 There is a footnote spanning pp. 54–55 of Just and Unjust Wars in which Walzer refers to “the problem of national minorities-groups of people who do not fully join (or do not join at all) in the contract that constitutes the nation.” There he claims that, unless they are subject to “radical mistreatment” (in which case their situation would fall under his third exception), they do not affect his argumentGoogle Scholar.

23 This claim echoes Derek Parfit's dictum about personal identity and self-interest: “If the fact of personal identity is less deep, so is the fact of non-identity.” See his Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 339Google ScholarPubMed.